So you've got three leading men in their 20s on the rise, and they're in Manhattan, shooting a romantic comedy about best friends surfing waves of beautiful women and trying not to wipe out. Add a dash of Shakespeare, and you've got "That Awkward Moment," starring Zac Efron, Michael B. Jordan, and suddenly-everywhere Miles Teller.

Teller has made a specialty of playing the smooth-talking slick guy with a heart, the unconventionally handsome fellow with irresistible savoir faire. In the new movie, he uses that charm to devastating effect. Offscreen.

"Yeah," the 26-year-old Teller says, with a confidential chuckle, of running wild in the city with Efron and Jordan. "While we were filming it, we were all single, so I guess life was imitating art a little bit. It was a good time to be ... it was a good time. That's all I'll say."

Writer-director Tom Gormican says it was also art imitating life, as the characters "were loosely based on people in my life, postcollege, living in New York City. It's myself and some close college friends' experiences living in New York. I loosely blended that with Shakespeare's play 'Love's Labour's Lost.' Three guys who give up on girls during their exams, hoping they'll do much better. It doesn't track it exactly, but that's the basic plot.

"Miles and I have similar senses of humor, and I think he can do anything. He has actually become friends with (the person on whom his character was based) in real life."

The easygoing Teller missed the cast's bonding weekend in the Adirondacks before production, but that didn't keep him from settling in with his co-stars.

"I don't think any of us had an ego on the project," Teller says in a separate interview. "We were three young guys coming to this business from different angles, and we were just ready to do it. Mike and Zac are still good buddies of mine; we just have personalities that mesh well together."

Gormican describes Teller's Daniel as "the funniest of the three characters" and says selling their friendship was the key to the film.

"The feeling you get from most casting is a bunch of people who are thrown together; they would not be friends in real life," he says. "You get the sense these guys actually care about each other."

Since Teller's debut in "Rabbit Hole" (2010) with Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart, he has been busy. "Awkward" is his sixth feature; his other films include the underrated broad comedy "21 and Over" and one of last year's best films, "The Spectacular Now," for which he shared a Sundance Special Jury Prize with co-star Shailene Woodley. He has no fewer than four more films scheduled for release this year, including franchise bait "Divergent" (with Woodley) and the Sundance opener "Whiplash."

Most dramatic role

Teller describes "Whiplash" as " 'Full Metal Jacket' at Juilliard ... the most dramatic thing I've done." That variety should rescue the actor from being typecast as the wisecracking Lothario.

"People are used to seeing him in comedies. They forget he was the kid in 'Rabbit Hole,' " Gormican says. "This kid has unbelievable dramatic chops. He can gear-change in a scene and go from pure comedy to heartbreaking."

Teller was born in Pennsylvania and raised first in New Jersey, then in "a small country town" in Florida. He got hooked on theater in high school (he was his drama club's president his senior year) by playing Willard in the "Footloose" musical - a role he would later earn in the film version. Though he knew Manhattan from attending New York University's Tisch School of the Arts, returning to shoot a movie was a revelation.

"When I was going to college there, I had no money," he says. "Me and my buddies played a lot of video games and kind of hung out. So to be in the city, shooting a movie with Zac, it was a pretty big deal. I had never really gone out to any of those places because I couldn't afford to."

Of course, hanging out with paparazzi bait in the middle of Manhattan had its dark side.

"It's a double-edged sword," he says of Efron's status. "The fame that gets you into nightclubs without waiting in line is the same fame that means, when you're filming a movie in New York, there are a hundred paparazzi standing right next to the camera. There are all these fans there. With social media, it gets out very quick wherever you're filming. I'd never really dealt with that."

Teller keeps things in perspective. He describes this as his time to be "selfish," because whenever he gets married down the road, his wife and children would come first.

Gormican, whose script was plucked from Hollywood's famous Black List of highly regarded, unproduced screenplays, says of Teller, "I would not be shocked if he becomes a director, because he thinks like a writer-director on set. He's thinking about how a scene works, how it comes together as a whole, not just his performance. He's thinking about how it works in the movie."

'Trash talking'

That awareness didn't stop Teller from being one of the guys.

"Miles thrives on trash talking. It's how he gets warmed up. I would come on the set and say, 'This is what we're going to do, this is what I'd like.' He'd say, 'Wait, wait, wait! I just have one question.' By the way, it was my first movie. 'What is it?' He goes, 'Who are you, again?' "

Now enjoying a rare break, Teller is working on something many young people can relate to: getting his house in order.

"The other day, I just bought a new coffeemaker and a toaster oven. I was able to clear away this counter," he says, sounding pleased. "Working at that, that's nice. I'm in so many hotels here and there, you like to have this nice, grounded place in your home."